Spokane physician Dr. Peter Weitzman won’t take individual credit for being selected as one of three doctors nationwide to be named as 2014 Acute Care Hospitalist of the Year by Los Angeles-based IPC Healthcare Inc. from among hospitalists it employs nationwide.

“To me, this is about what our group has achieved,” says Weitzman, referring to the 10 other doctors and four other medical professionals who are employed by IPC here and working with him at Providence Holy Family Hospital.

IPC is a Los Angeles-based, hospitalist physician group that operates and manages hospitalist practices. Weitzman is an IPC practice group leader at Holy Family.

IPC has employed medical professionals in Spokane since 2011. Across the country, IPC’s medical professionals are placed in acute-care hospitals, post-acute care facilities, nursing homes, and assisted-care facilities, says Elaine Murphy, an account manager with Scott Public Relations of Canoga Park, Calif., which coordinates IPC media relations.

Nationally, IPC currently operates practices in 24 states and has about 1,800 providers, including physicians and other medical specialists, serving in roughly 400 acute-care hospitals and more than 1,200 post-acute care facilities

The Society of Hospital Medicine says there are currently more than 44,000 hospitalists practicing nationwide.

Hospitalist physicians focus on a patient’s hospital care from the time of admission to discharge, and have no outpatient responsibilities. IPC was founded in 1995 by hospitalist physicians and, in 2008, became the first publicly traded hospitalist company in the U.S., Murphy says.

Weitzman, who is 50, was raised in Berkeley, Calif., and earned his M.D. from the UCLA medical school. He moved to Spokane with his wife in 1993 and started working directly for Holy Family, at 5633 N. Lidgerwood. 

The role of the hospitalist has increased as the demand for medical care—and North Spokane’s population—has done the same. The original Holy Family Hospital, which opened in 1964, had only about 110,500 square feet of space, says Anne McKeon, manager of marketing and communications for the hospital.

The facility underwent its first major expansion in 1971 when two floors were added to the original three-story structure, taking it to more than 154,000 square feet. Close to two dozen expansions have occurred since then, the hospital’s website says.

Holy Family now has more than 486,000 square feet. The hospital’s entire surface area, which includes parking, is 1.05-million square feet; equivalent to 24 acres. The physical building that houses Providence Holy Family Hospital occupies 11.6 acres altogether, McKeon says.

Weitzman joined the hospital staff at time when patient visits were increasing. That’s when hospital staff began having discussions about how to implement the use of hospitalists.

“The idea is to enhance the patient experience,” Weitzman says. “As a hospitalist, I can spend more time with the patient and their family and provide them with the answers that they need in a challenging time; a challenging environment.”

He began working for IPC in 2011, but remained at Holy Family.

“The hospitalist concept is about improving the delivery of care, improving the safety, and enhancing the level of communication between physicians, medical staff, and patients,” Weitzman says. “Today, there are very few hospitals without hospitalists.”

IPC and Holy Family operate the hospitalist program collaboratively. Since the mid-1990s, Kathy Smith has worked as director of case management here for Spokane-based Providence Health Care. She has worked closely with Weitzman since Holy Family officials began creating their own hospitalist program. She says she’s not surprised that Weitzman won a nationwide award.

“Dr. Weitzman is one of the most intelligent doctors I’ve ever worked with in my 35-year career,” Smith says. “He’s innovative, quick to respond, loves to teach, and overall is just very well respected.”

Weitzman deflected the praise. He says IPC places a premium on hospitalists “valuing the interaction” they have with their respective facilities

“In the traditional model of patient care, the physician used to be a visitor to the hospital,” Weitzman says. “That’s not what IPC or Providence Health Care are interest in.”

At least one hospitalist is on staff each morning at 8:30 to do a “rounding up” with other IPC staff working at Providence Holy Family to give an overview of the in-patient roster, Weitzman says. Hospitalists, bedside nurses, case managers, and social workers are all part of the morning meeting.

“That’s why I say this is team award, and I’m not any more deserving than anybody else,” Weitzman says. “Our goal is the same; get patients well so they can go home. We don’t have an office; our office is at the bedside.”

Weitzman says he finds great reward in being a hospitalist physician.

“We want them (patients) to know we’re a community working with each other and talking about them in order to provide them the best care possible,” he says.